4 ms·
If you shuffle a deck of 3 billion cards, the order is less compressible than the human genome. It's still not special. Is it complex, by your definition? How
by philh 11y ago
If you shuffle a deck of 3 billion cards, the order is less compressible than the human genome. It's still not special. Is it complex, by your definition?
How about my scribble, or a snowflake?
- bduerst 11y agoIt would be complex but no longer unique. If you randomly generated 3 billion alphabet characters, would it be instructions for building a Saturn V rocket? The blueprints for building a single cell?
- philh 11y agoWhy would a shuffle of 3 billion distinct cards be less unique than a shuffle of 52 distinct cards? > If you randomly generated 3 billion alphabet characters, would it be instructions for building a Saturn V rocket? The blueprints for building a single cell? No. It would be a unique string of worthless jibberish. Meanwhile, the instructions for a Saturn V rocket have probably been written down in at least two places. So if you have a copy of them, they're less unique than my random string, yet more special.
- bduerst 11y agoRight, the information is unique, not the medium. There are multiple copies of the Saturn V blueprints, just as there are multiple copies of the human genome in your cells. Is Lord of the Rings not unique because it's stored on multiple mediums?
- cousin_it 11y agoMaybe along with Kolmogorov complexity we could measure "usefulness" of a bit string, i.e. how much utility an agent would agree to pay for it. The idea is that "complex" things, like life, are likely to contain solutions to many problems we care about. Of course that approach depends on the agent, but maybe you could get a general definition by referring to a general agent, like AIXItl.
- chm 11y agoWouldn't the compression depend on how many symbols you used? I guess you meant "shuffle a deck of 3 billion different cards"?